On a day of hazy peek-a-boo sunshine this week, in search of apples, I took a little drive out to the farm stall on Animas Creek.
Turned out to be perfect timing for autumn colour.
Cottonwood gold and Sycamore rust (I think - but I wasn't born to this landscape)
The first time ever I set foot on continental United States was autumn in the Pacific Northwest when the maples were turning bight yellow. A season of dis-location and dis-orientation happens every year for me now, heralded by this arboreal immersion in colour.
There's no going back when one travels on a one way ticket. I know autumn colour is wondrously, magically, beautiful but it's an achingly devastating beauty for me, like a magnificent body of water with treacherous deep undercurrents and whirlpools to suck one under. Drowning not waving.
What better place to reckon all that's lost, than Animas Creek in autumn?
Wandering and wondering. The "a" and the "o" sound combine to make "aum" - the first sound of the creation in Hindu philosophy, commonly written as Om.
Om: the Word which was in the beginning.
Or as most versions of John1:1 in the Christian Bible (New Testament) put it: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Divinity is sound. Aum. The original sound.